The English 'Bac' will make it easier for parents to distinguish good schools from bad

Michael Gove wants league tables to be more accurate (Photo: JOHN ROBERTSON)

It's not hard to work out why so many people are objecting to the introduction of the English Baccalaureate to the secondary school league tables. In brief, what Michael Gove has done is to introduce a new column in the secondary school league tables enabling parents to see what percentage of pupils at a particular school managed to get five GCSEs at grade C or above in maths, English, a science subject, a humanities subject and foreign language.

Objectors to this measure, which on the face of it seems entirely benign, fall into two categories. First, there are the head teachers and governors of schools who aren't faring well according to this criterion. They're upset that the goal posts have been shifted. They were under the impression their schools would be judged according to the percentage of pupils achieving five good GCSEs including maths and English. The fact that they had a good deal of latitude when it came to what the other three subjects were enabled them to inflate their schools' rankings by steering their pupils towards soft subjects, such as BTECs and Diplomas. A Diploma in Hair and Beauty, for instance, is judged to be worth the equivalent of four GCSEs at grade C. They can still do this, of course, and many schools will. But by publishing more information about what GCSEs a school's pupils are performing well in, Michael Gove has made it harder for schools to, in effect, game the system. He has provided parents with the information they need to make a more accurate assessment of how a school is performing and what its priorities are.

The second category of objectors are defenders of Labour's record on education, such as Andy Burnham. "Labour supports academic rigour, which is why we included English and maths in performance tables and promoted an increase in the take up of separate sciences," he said yesterday. "But we also support student choice which this prescriptive and narrow English Bac will take away."

Prescriptive? Actually, it isn't. Secondary schools can ignore the new column in the league tables. It's only if parents start to express a clear preference for schools that perform well according to this measure that they will have to start paying more attention to it. And why shouldn't governors and head teachers be more responsive to what parents want? Burnham's real reason for objecting to the English Baccalaureate is that it shows just how empty Labour's claims to have "improved" our schools are. As the Telegraph reveals today, only 13.6 per cent of pupils in England's comprehensive schools achieved an English Bac, compared to over two-thirds in England's grammar schools. The widespread dumbing down that occurred over the past 13 years is laid bare.

Some defenders of the old-style league tables object to certain subjects, such as History, which counts towards the English Bac, being valued more highly than those that don't, such as Media Studies. On Radio 5 Live yesterday, Gove was assailed by an angry parent who insisted that all subjects should be valued equally. But it's precisely this misguided egalitarianism that has resulted in the attainment gap between the state sector and the independent sector growing ever-wider, thereby propping up the class system.

The Labour MP David Lammy recently complained that Oxford and Cambridge were admitting too few black students, but that's not because Oxbridge colleges are racially prejudiced. It's because the vast majority of black applicants come from comprehensives where they've been steered away from more academically challenging subjects by teachers who are more concerned about their schools' standing in the league tables than their pupils' academic futures. Unfortunately, when black pupils from comprehensives apply to top universities, they discover that admissions tutors aren't over-impressed by their GCSEs in Media Studies.

In the Times today (£), a governor of a comprehensive reveals the pressure his school has been placed under over the past 13 years by various agents of the state to focus on vocational subjects at the expense of academic ones in order to foster the illusion that Labour has "improved" state education. "In recent years schools have been strongly encouraged (by local authority advisers, School Improvement Partners, National Challenge advisers and Ofsted inspectors) to steer more pupils into early vocational courses rather than academic GCSEs, so as to improve their performance on published measures."

It is precisely this scandalous behaviour – ensuring children from comprehensives find it much more difficult to compete with public schoolboys and girls when it comes to securing places at top universities and, ultimately, top jobs – that the English Bac is designed to curb.